mptoms--let us dive deeper than the
superficial manifestations--let us ask why is it that the South were so
specially disaffected by the election of a given individual, or the
success of a given political party, to an extent and with an expression
given to that disaffection wholly disproportionate to any such cause,
and wholly unknown to the political usages of the land? Why is the South
susceptible to this intense degree of offence at the ordinary
contingency of defeat in a political encounter? Why, again, does the
persistent discussion or agitation of _any_ subject tend so specially to
inflame the Southern mind beyond all the ordinary limits of
moderation--to the denial of the freedom of speech, the freedom of the
press, and finally of the right of national existence itself to the
North--except in conformity with preconceived opinions and theories of
its own? Why were they of the South standing ready, as to their mental
posture, for any or every rash and unadvised step? Why, again, are the
Southern people uneducated and ignorant, as the predominant fact
respecting a majority of their population? Why is the state of popular
information in that whole region of a nominally free country, such as to
make it an easy thing to impose upon their credulity and instruct them
into a full belief in the most absurd and monstrous fabrications, or
falsifications of the truth? Why were the ordinary sources of
information excluded from their minds, more than from ours, or from the
population of any other country? Why this fatal facility on the part of
the Southern public for being misled by the designing purposes of
ambitious demagogues; imbued with unjust prejudices; deluded into a
murderous assault upon their best friends, and into the infliction of
the most serious political injury upon themselves? Why, as a people, are
they prompt to rush from the pursuits of peace into all the horrors and
contingencies of war?--from the enjoyment of political freedom, at least
nominal and apparent, into the arms of a military despotism, the natural
and necessary ultimatum of the course which they have chosen to adopt?

The one and sole answer to all these questions is, Slavery. Some one has
said, in speaking of the present crisis, that the sentiment of loyalty
has never been prevalent at the South. This is a grand mistake. No
people on the surface of the planet have more sincerely felt or more
invariably and unflinchingly demonstrated loyalty than